#MovieReview: New Hunger Games movie is surprisingly good [Watch]
Songbirds includes a surprisingly deep bench of well-known actors in supporting roles, namely Viola Davis, Peter Dinklage and Jason Schwartzman.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is clunkily named and overlong, but surprisingly enjoyable.
A prequel to the young adult dystopian Hunger Games series, this movie is a clear attempt at revitalising a cash cow product for a new generation.
It is the latest in a long lineage of reworked titles that try to recapture box office magic and is something which rarely works.
A recent example is the much-maligned The Exorcist: Believer, which Universal put out earlier this year after spending $400-million to secure development rights for the horror franchise.
Which is all to say, I went into Songbirds expecting to see an undercooked story which was saddled with trying to retroactively establish exposition for the main Hunger Games series.
But frankly, I liked it and I think it is the best movie of the five that have been produced from Suzanne Collins’ hit series of books to date.
Of course that is not too high a bar to clear, but credit should be given for making Songbirds a better-produced and better-acted movie than it needed to be.
Songbirds includes a surprisingly deep bench of well-known actors in supporting roles, namely Viola Davis, Peter Dinklage and Jason Schwartzman.
They elevate the straightforward material alongside strong performances from newcomer Tom Blyth in the lead role and one of the new faces of Hollywood, Rachel Zegler.
It is a good reminder of how the young adult boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s provided a showcase for future stars which otherwise does not exist on this scale.
Mild spoilers to follow
Songbirds charts the course to power of despotic president Coriolanus Snow, the main villain from the series of books and movies.
Snow is the one who oversees the division of Panem, the dystopian future country which sections its citizens into 12 districts and forces them to send two children to fight to the death in the titular Hunger Games.
But Snow was not always evil and Songbirds provides a pretty nuanced depiction of how someone can be led down the wrong path when promised untold power.
The movie is certainly overstuffed at two-and-a-half hours, but manages to mostly keep up its tense undercurrent throughout.
Rated 16 for Violence.
3.5/5.
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